


Oceans Come (From Easy Streams)

by girlmarauders



Category: Marvel Cinematic Universe
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Alternate Universe - Law Enforcement, Alternate Universe - Small Town, F/F
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-04-27
Updated: 2018-04-27
Packaged: 2019-04-28 13:49:16
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 6,027
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14450580
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/girlmarauders/pseuds/girlmarauders
Summary: At the end of the Winter Soldier, all of Natasha's covers are blown. A job application to be the sheriff of a small town in Montana gives her a chance at a new life, and attracts Maria's attention.





	Oceans Come (From Easy Streams)

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Lucifuge5](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Lucifuge5/gifts).



One of the few benefits of being an international media sensation in hiding was that she was seeing a lot more of Bruce. 

“You really should go home at some point,” he said, passing her a mug of tea on his way past her to his home lab. His ‘New York’ place wasn’t even in the city at all, after he’d insisted on a low population density area. Indian Lake was a nice enough upstate small town, a lot of clapboard houses, a gas station. Bruce kept saying there was a pizza place but Natasha would believe it when she saw it. Tony had bought Bruce a big house on the edge, if a town that gradually petered out into trees could be described as having an edge, and refurbed the inside with reinforced doors, a giant basement panic room, a state-of-the-art lab. Bruce had put his foot down before Tony had gone overboard, and the living room, kitchen and guest bed has been left alone, still populated with old worn furniture from the previous owner.

“Tired of me already?” She asked, raising a single eyebrow at him.  He huffed and gave her one of his long even looks, as if he could see right through her to whatever she was hiding. 

“No, but hiding from the press in upstate New York doesn’t seem very sustainable. You’ll have to go back eventually.”

She smiled at him, widely, pretending that he didn’t know she was running scared of this new world.

“I don’t think I have to,” she said. He sighed again.

“Whatever, I’m not fighting you about it.” He said, turning to the hallway to his lab. She leaned back on the sofa, letting her head clunk against the back. He was right, in a roundabout way. Bruce’s was safe and quiet, without the media or Hydra, or much else to worry about. She’d taken her Avengers phone with her, and every night she scrolled through the missed call list. Steve had called regularly until they talked at Fury’s grave, and now didn’t call at all. Tony and Pepper were still trying to reach her, and government numbers she didn’t know kept calling, but she hadn’t answered. They would all want something from her, and SHIELD’s downfall was a lesson: people who wanted things from her usually had bad motives. Never say she had to learn the same lesson twice. 

Bruce’s laptop had pretty great encryption, but he was not a computer scientist, and she’d never asked for his password, just broken in each time she wanted to use the internet. Mostly she’d been scrolling Russian news sites and playing games on VK, since she hadn’t had free internet time since she’d joined SHIELD. She didn’t care about the politics stuff, since she had better intel than any of the journalists in Moscow, but she liked reading the interior news, about the towns and cities she remembered from her childhood. The memories from before the Red Room have always been clearest in her mind, untouched by the periods of blankness, of strange dream-like unreality that have punctured her adulthood. But, this time, she felt different. Aimless scrolling was all she could manage, but this time she found herself scrolling through the vacancies on the government law enforcement database. She suspected Fury, or maybe Maria, had pulled some strings, because everything still recognised her security clearance. She could have broken in, if she’d really wanted to, but it would have been at least a minor irritation. 

It wasn’t that she was broke. She had prepared for disasters most of her life, and like any good spy she had been ready to lose everything at a moments notice. She had enough money for the foreseeable future, especially once the fuss died down and she could sell her New York apartment. But she hated being useless, inactive. She’d been trained to serve a purpose, and holding still, even in Bruce’s house, bothered her. She couldn't recall a time in her life when she hadn't had a job in front of her: the Red Room, life as an independent asset, work for the CIA and then SHIELD, the Avengers and now - nothing.

Most of the vacancies were entry-level, and she scrolled past them quickly. Jobs in airports were out of the question, too many cameras, and nothing in big cities, where she’d done work for SHIELD. One entry caught her eye: SUNBURST, MT SHERIFF – IMMEDIATE VACANCY.

Montana was far away, and even more private than Indian Lake. The entry was sparse, but there was a vacancy for the Toole Country Sheriff, vacated on the death of the previous sheriff, and the county was appointing someone until the election in three years. She was overqualified, but a lot of her qualifications were classified, so her resume looked more sparse than she would have liked. She changed the address at the top, added an end date to her SHIELD Analyst & Unit Manager experience, and emailed it off, shrugging her shoulders. At the very least it had made her edit her resume.

She got distracted playing Dragon City later, and forgot all about it.

 

&&&

 

Bruce took her to the pizza place, just to prove it definitely did exist. People usually left them alone when they left the house, which they did rarely, but when she glanced around the shabby restaurant she could see some of the younger children recognising them and being shushed. Indian Lake wasn’t concerned with superheroes or spies, and her and Bruce ate their pizza in companionable silence. 

The mailman was at the door when they got home, and he turned to Bruce when they stepped up onto the porch. 

“I’ve got some letters for you,” he said cheerfully, and Bruce shuffled nervously, nervous in front of a new person.

“Thanks,” he said quietly, taking the white envelopes and plastic-wrapped catalogue. 

“Ma’m,” said the mailman, nodding at Natasha when he stepped off the porch. Bruce shouldered the front door open, flipping through the envelopes with his free hands. He frowned, his eyebrows curling down. 

“This is for you,” he said, lifting a thick browm envelope. She felt a mirror-image of his frown on her own face. 

“I haven’t told anyone I’m here,” she said, reaching for the envelope carefully. Without his glasses, Bruce was squinting at the post stamp. 

“Well, you told someone in Montana, by the looks of it.” he said.

She managed to pull the envelope from his hands, and dug her thumbnail under the fold, ripping it open. She flipped through a few pages of forms on yellow paper, before the cover letter opened and she read aloud.  “Dear Miss. Romonoff, The Toole County Sheriff’s Department is pleased to offer you a position of employment as the Sheriff of Toole County, based in Sunburst, Montana. Please complete and return the included documents and contract in order to process your employment speedily. We look forward to meeting you in Sunburst, where you will be sworn in. Sincerely yours, The Toole County Sheriff’s Department.”

She paused, and Bruce was silent for a long time. She kept staring at the letter, the Toole County logo printed at the top. It had wind farms in it, reaching into the air over an orange background.

“Natasha, is this a joke?” Bruce said slowly, seemingly recovering the ability to speak. “Because I know you’re much funnier than this.”

“No,” she said. “I applied, I’d forgotten about it. I didn’t think I’d get it, you know?” 

Bruce shook his head. 

“Well, I’ll go find a pen, you can read that thing and find out when you start.”

It turned out she started in a week, which didn’t leave a lot of time to put everything right. Bruce drove her to the dealership in the next town over, and she paid too much for a silver Toyota pickup, and drove it back to his, one hand on the steering wheel and the other holding her phone as she spoke to the lawyer who was going to sell her apartment. 

Bruce had a pile of old duffel bags from when he had moved, and she drove into the city and threw some of her clothes, guns and knives into bags indiscriminately. There wasn’t much else important to her, aside from some books, and she left the rest for the lawyer to sell. Bruce made spaghetti that night, and she ate ravenously, one eye on her tablet as she read Wikipedia articles about Montana. He kept trying to make small talk, and at one point ask her about why she was moving to Montana, but she fixed him with a flat glare and said “I thought you wanted me out of the house” which shut him up pretty fast.

The drive was long, made shorter by the fact Natasha needed very little sleep. She slept in the car in rest stops for a few hours every day, trying not to push herself too much. Her training would let her go for days without sleeping if she wanted to, and she felt itchy, strangely nervous. She wanted to get to her destination. Slowly forest turned into flat plains, as if the earth was falling away in front of her as she drove. 

It seemed that Montana snuck up on her and suddenly she was on the highway to Helena, only one lane each way. It seemed a shame to end her journey early, but she drove overnight, watching the dark night sky burst into a strange light show that she realised was the milky way. She showered at an hourly motel in Helena, about three hours out from Sunburst, and braided her hair in a single long French braid. She dressed as sensibly as she could, in beige khakis and a red shirt, her arrow necklace tucked under the neckline. 

As she drove into Sunburst, she realised that her concern about finding the sherriff’s office when she arrived had been misplaced. The main road through the town was sometimes barely distinguishable from the dirt around it, and few of the houses or buildings had driveways, their vehicles just parked on grass or cleared dirt. She could see to the end of most of the roads that branched off from the main one, and there weren’t many. 

The Post Office and Sheriff’s Office were the same one building, a squat grey thing with the plastic look of buildings erected quickly. She pulled the car up alongside an aging van parked outside, and stepped out in the heat of a Montana summer. There was a strong wind blowing over the flat plains, full of hot air. She grabbed the bag with her personal items off the passenger seat, throwing it over her shoulder. It had her phone, a change of clothes, her two best guns and a picture of Clint’s family, everything she’d need to get started. All of her other things were in the pile of bags in the bed of the truck. 

She knocked nervously on the front door of the station, shifting her weight. She didn’t know why she was nervous. They’d offered  _ her _ the job, after all, and making sure a town of 300 relatively normal people didn’t murder each other was a piece of cake compared to corralling Steve when he got the bit between his teeth.

The door swung open inwards, pulled open forcefully by a tall man in a baseball cap. 

“Hiya,” he said loudly, “you must be Natasha! Welcome to Sunburst.” 

Still only halfway through the door, he stuck out his hand and grasped Natasha’s firmly, giving it a good shake. She smiled back. 

“It’s nice to be here,” she said. 

Shane turned out to be on the town council, and they swore her in on a bible they borrowed from the church across the street. They had to send a deputy to get it, and the office area with the deputy’s desks was too small to hold the town council, the four deputies, the judge who’d driven up from Helena, and the dispatcher, who turned out to also be the postmaster, so they’d all followed the judge out to the two trees behind the office, and Natasha had said her oath beneath a bedraggled oak tree.

The judge clapped on her on the back when she finished.  “Well, that’s the easy bit over. I’ve got an arraignment in Helena, so I’ll drive back now. Good luck!” He said, which was the last she heard from Helena until she made her first arrest. 

Shane showed her around that day, driving her around in his minivan strewn with children’s toys and sports equipment. They drove the loop of paved road that went past the high school, leggy teenagers doing laps on the track field, and Shane pointed out his house, a white and green sprawling clapboard, with a sagging porch and a kid’s tricycle upside down on the lawn. 

“How long have you lived here?” She asked, after Shane pulled away from the high school and started down a thin, barely paved road towards some of the outlying farms. 

“Born and bred,” he said easily, giving someone walking on the side of the road a wave. “My wife’s from Kevin, past Helena, we met at the rodeo. But my family’s been in Sunburst since the beginning. My dad had a farm, but that’s my brother’s now. I teach at the high school. Got two kids in the elementary school too, where my wife teaches, and another one on the way.”

“Congratulations,” Natasha said gently, at the beaming father. He nodded.

“The council was plenty glad when we got your resume.” He said, turning down an empty road. “Marcus, the last sheriff, was a great guy, but he was getting slower before his heart attack. A crying shame that, he’d come to the town from North Dakota and stayed with us a while. Think it’ll be good to have a change, have some new blood in the town.” 

“Why wasn’t there a sheriff’s election with the deputies?” She asked. Shane shook his head.

“Ryan and Tom only started a few years ago, they don’t even have their certifications yet. Tara don’t want it, on account of her kid about to start school, and Santi’s not qualified yet. So the council appointed someone. Your contract’s only until the election date, but you’re free to stand if you still wanna stay in Sunburst.” He smiled fondly, the smile of a man who was sure he was in the best place on Earth. She’d seen it on a lot of people in small towns before, those who didn’t feel stuck but blessed.

“Do you think I’ll want to?” She asked, smiling so he knew it wasn’t meant rudely. He grinned and gestured out the car window, to the rolling prairie, blue mountains hazy in the distance. 

“Who’d want to leave this?” 

&&&

 

Natasha’s always been grateful that she’s a fast learner, but it still took her two tries to figure out how to police the rodeo. The first one, she stayed by the truck near the entrance gate, and she was too far away when some drunk rancher started a fight with Sarah Cooper’s boy. No one got shot, since she’s beaten it into her deputies that if they fire their gun without explicit permission she won’t hesitate to fire them, but a whole bunch of people got punched, and Ryan, her tall gangly deputy, got his arm broken. 

The second rodeo, when she’s had more time in town, goes a little smoother, but not much. Ryan gets his other arm broken, but that was his own fault, since he decided to compete, but Natasha’s decision to put herself and the deputies on foot became a problem when someone stole Don Rickman’s prize heifer and drove off with it. Eventually, she had to borrow Shane’s minivan, car seat still on the back seat, and drive her and Santi to the Clearwater’s, where she threatened her teenage son until him and his friends gave the damn cow back. Don gave her and Santi enough beef jerky to feed them for years, after that, but she was still put out over having to deal with actual cattle rustling. 

This rodeo, this rodeo was going to go smoothly, even if it killed her. She finally listened to Tom’s dad, who’d been a deputy before him, and put all the deputies on horses. There were enough other people riding that they didn’t look stupid, and it made seeing through the crowds easier. Santi was the only one uncomfortable on a horse, since he was about the only deptuty who hadn’t grown up on a farm, or had family who lived on one. Natasha secretly suspected she was the best rider among them. The Red Room hadn’t believed in leaving anything out, and she had been a trick-rider for a circus as cover before. 

She was stationed on the entrance, wearing her best uniform. She still felt ridiculous polishing the badge, even on her third year of the job, but she couldn’t deny it looked good when she wore the whole sheriff get-up, including the cowboy hat that kept the sun out of her eyes. 

“Hello Natasha,” said a familiar voice from behind her, and Natasha had to walk Cherry, the horse on loan from the Rickmans, in an awkward circle to get face on.

Maria was at least wearing boots, even if the sharp dove-grey suit she was wearing was all wrong for the rodeo. She looked out of place, her long dark hair pulled up in a loose bun. 

“Maria?” Natasha asked, lifting the front brim of her hat to see better. “What on earth are you doing here?”

Maria looked around with her clever analyst’s eye, although she had that disappointed frown Natasha recognised from whenever a new SHIELD agent failed inspection.  “Apparently the Sunburst rodeo is a local event of some tourist significance.” She said, although she sounded doubtful. Natasha wanted to glare at her, or say something to defend Sunburst, but she didn’t want to drive Maria away. She was still happy to see her. She lifted her radio.

“Tara, could you come and cover the entrance? I need a moment,” she said, and a quick confirmation crackled back. With a soft kick, Cherry stepped closer to the hitching post, and Natasha dismounted easily, wrapping Cherry’s lead rain around the post. 

Maria looked at her levelly, with one of her even, sardonic looks, but Natasha had seen that before and stepped forward to wrap her in a quick hug. Maria was stiff for a moment and then relaxed into the hug, a momentary lapse in her facade that Natasha ignored. Sometimes the instincts never left. Someone went for a hug and you thought first to reach for your knife. Thoughts like that still haunted her, even here, when anyone trying to sneak up on you would be seen from miles away.

“It’s good to see you,” she said, pulling back to get a good look at Maria. No new injuries she could see, just the old, faint scar on her hairline, a burn scar on the side of her neck, just barely visible. All the familiar markings Natasha recognised on an old friend and comrade. 

“Well, I’m just glad you haven’t gotten eaten by a bison,” Maria said, also clearly satisfied with her own quick inspection. Natasha rolled her eyes. 

“Bison don’t eat people,” he said. Maria shrugged, and pulled the bag she had over her shoulder higher.

“You’re a long way away from civilisation, you never know, bison could go rabid.”

Natasha laughed.

“C’mon,” she said, pushing Maria’s shoulder. “The trick-riding is on soon, we can go watch.”

Nothing really big went wrong after that, although Tom broke some toes when Cherry stood on his foot, which was his own fault. She didn’t know how she had got such accident-prone deputies, but a few broken toes was definitely an upward trajectory for her rodeos. 

Maria raised one eyebrow at the trick-riding, which was her version of amazement, so Natasha counted it as a win. The drive home to Natasha’s house was less impressive. She could feel Maria adding up the small shabby store, the tiny churches, train tracks across the main road without stoplights or rail guards. She’d never really been house-proud, moving between residences too often, but she dared Maria to say something sarcastic about the sheriff’s house, with its paint-stripped porch, and the screen door with a hole in it. It was hers. The mailbox by the drive said “SHERIFF” on it, in square stick-on letters, and her back yard led imperceptibility into the Miller’s, where their kids played baseball and complicated made-up chase games. This place was home now. Three years was a long time for anyone to be anywhere, but definitely the longest Natasha had stayed in one place. 

Maria stood in the driveway, for a few moments, just staring at the house. Natasha hadn’t managed to shift the out-of-place feeling; that Maria looked too put together, too clean, too something-else to be staring at Natasha’s house, in a place that Natasha’s old life had barely touched, without superheroes or villains. People here thought about superheros they thought about tv stars or space - a far away spectacle without any impact on real life. Maria came from that far away place, and Natasha realised she had not thought how to marry her past with Sunburst. 

“It’s nice,” Maria said, after a while, and Natasha exhaled. 

Inside, once Maria had put her bag on the guest bed, and Natasha had started coffee, then finally Maria said what she meant. 

“None of us understood why you’d gone,” Maria said, steepling her fingers, elbows on the linolium kitchen table. Natasha shrugged. 

“All my covers were blown,” she said, putting a mug of coffee down in front of Maria. She rolled her eyes. 

“So you make new ones, it’s not like that’s never happened before.” She said. Natasha looked out her kitchen window, over the scruffy grass of her back yard, and made a face. Was Sunburst a new cover? She had not thought that when she came here. “You didn’t tell anyone where you’d gone.” Maria added, more quietly. Natasha made a noise, although she wasn’t quite sure what she was trying to convey. Did Maria mean that she hadn’t told  _ her? _ Her appearance had raised more questions than Natasha had answers for, and it unsettled her.

“I told Bruce. I’m not in hiding.” she said.

“You’re a small-town sheriff in Montana,” Maria said. “You’re hardly utilising your talents.”

“I don’t like all my talents,” Natasha shot back. “Maybe I don’t want to utilise them.” 

Maria frowned. 

“We can do good work,” she said. Natasha shook her head. 

“That was what got me into that mess, into SHIELD, too close to the trees to see the forest, thinking I could do good work, that walking in the shadows could help people.” She said, sitting down across from Maria. “I do good work here. In the light.”

“What? Guarding rodeos and finding stolen cows?”

“I don’t expect you to understand,” Natasha snapped, and then immediately felt bad. Maria’s face shuttered closed, the dark, blank look in her eyes Natasha recognised from continuing to work when everything had gone all to hell. They were both going about this all wrong. So what if her job was rodeos and stolen cows? Selling a prize cow could pay a family’s mortgage for a month. Maria probably did do good work, in her own way. 

“We were worried,” Maria said. “We were worried, when you left and didn’t come back.”

“We?”

“Steve and Sam. Me. Tony as well, although not in so many words.” Maria said, her shoulders slumped slightly. Natasha wanted to reach out and touch her. She sighed, and slid into one of the dining chairs across from her. 

“This isn’t a new cover.” She said, looking down at her coffee mug. “No one expects me to be a new person here.”

Maria smiled a little, at that. She’d never been a spy on the ground, not like Natasha, but even an analyst knew what it was like to change personas. Natasha watched her smile grow into something more laden with humour.

“Well, it is very…quaint,” Maria said, with a clear pause. Natasha reached over to push her shoulder gently.

“Don’t knock it,” she said. “I like it.”

“It doesn’t have a movie theatre.” 

“My office doubles as the post office,” Natasha said, deadpan, and Maria laughed. Natasha had always liked Maria’s laugh, how it lit up her blue eyes. She was tough; they were both tough, but Natasha liked to see the softness of Maria’s private expressions, the crinkle at the corner of her eyes when she smiled, the softness of her pink tongue when she laughed. 

They stayed like that for a while, in the kitchen, laughing and drinking coffee. It hurt less, to remember people, when New York seemed far away, and they talked about old friends. Some of those friends were disappeared, or dead, but laughing at the jokes they remembered doesn’t cut too deeply. Maria seemed to be ticking off a list in her head of updates. Bruce was in Zambia, working in a yellow fever hospital, criminally wasting his talents according to Tony but happy and less afraid according to Bruce. Steve was in Europe, hunting leads on the Winter Soldier, while Sam stayed in Washington D.C., feeding him intel. 

Natasha made an uncomplicated spaghetti for dinner, and Maria laughed at her again when desert was pie brought over by a neighbour, as a thank you for finding the family dog wandering on the side of the highway. She usually ate well on things neighbours brought over, pies and casseroles and big dishes of pasta salad. Unlike most people around her, she wasn’t much for cooking her own meals, and the women of the town had quickly seized on her as someone they needed to feed up. 

As Natasha fell asleep, she thought of Maria asleep in the other room, and wondered how her life must appear from the outside. The changes has seemed gradual to Natasha, who had lived them, but Maria must see her settled in this small town, unremarkable aside from glorious sunsets, and wondered what had happened. Just as sleep took her, Natasha thought that nothing specific had happened. It had happened too much and too slowly for it to be any one thing, that had made her more comfortable here than in New York City, but it had happened nonetheless.

She woke, flailing slightly, to the sound of her landline ringing. In the dark, her eyes still adjusting, she groped along her bedside table, and grabbed the phone.

“Hello?” She said sleepily into it. It was still dark outside.

“Nat, sorry, we got a tourist lost hiking in the Buttes. Whitlash Post Office just called us.” Tara said, on the other end of the line. 

Natasha swore, and then heard Tara apologise again.

“Not you, Tara.” She apologised quickly. “I’ll be at the office in a minute, get the search gear together.”

She hung up and dressed in the dark, throwing on the sheriff’s uniform she’s long used to. She grabbed her hat on the way out the door, as a passing thought. It was dark now but searching was long hot work, and she wasn’t interested in sunburning her neck once the sun rose.

Maria’s door was open slightly, and she knocked on the door frame before pushing it open. She saw Maria reach for her gun while she was still in the process of waking up, and then leave it when she realised it was Natasha. 

“What’s going on?” She asked sleepily. 

“Sorry.” Natasha said quietly. “I have to head out. A hiker’s gotten lost, and we’re going to start looking for them.” 

Maria rolled out of bed, pulling her sleep shirt over her head and grabbing her bra and t-shirt off a chair. In the dark, she was pale, the curves of her body falling in and out of shadow, even as she clasped her bra and pulled on her black t-shirt. Even sleepy, Natasha watched appreciatively. She didn’t get a lot of chances here in Montana. 

“I’ll come with you,” she said, yawning gently. Natasha discarded the twinge of thought that wanted to leave Maria behind. The more bodies, the better.

There was cold coffee in the kitchen, which she drank while waiting. Maria emerged from the bedroom somewhat more like the woman Natasha remembered from the helicarrier, with a gun strapped to her thigh and her hair pulled tightly back. The sky was starting to turn dawn-grey when they pulled up next to the sheriff’s office, the deputies trucks parked haphazardly around. Tara was waiting out the front, holding one of the search bags they kept on hand. Glacier Park was pretty far away from Sunburst, but tourists were often stupid enough to get lost in the nearby hiking trails, which made them Natasha’s responsibility. 

Inside the office, the deputies and a few town regulars with good trucks were assembled, waiting for Natasha. Someone, probably Tara, who was the most competent, had stuck a printed photo of the tourist, a college student with red hair, on the office white board and written “NOAH SIMMONS” under it in big letters. 

“This our guy?” She asked Tara, nodding at the whiteboard. She nodded. 

“Told his friends in Whitlash he’d check in last night but never showed up. We think he was trying Mount Brown, and went off the trail.” 

“Well, I guess it’s only been a night, he can’t have gotten too far.” She said hopefully, and glanced around the office at the deputies. Tom, who’d broken his toes yesterday, was being left behind to man the phones and looked glum about it, although he always looked that way. Ryan was tall and gangly, with brown hair that fell forward into his face in a cowlick. He’d take the lead on the search, since he was from Whitlash and also the most experienced hiker. Santi was still yawning, a baseball cap pulled low over his eyes against the office light. He was the slowest of all of them so she usually put him in the back. He had a better eye for detail than Ryan, and she trusted him to catch what the others missed. 

Tara was emptying a drawer of handheld GPS devices. She was probably going to end up Sheriff, once her kids were in high school. Taller than Natasha, but only slightly, she was willowy and pretty, her dark skin throwing her cheek downs into sharp relief. 

“Alright guys, everyone here knows the drill. Ryan and Santi, take the trail. I want you to hike staggered, so Santi, you give Ryan a head start but keep him in view. Tara will take the far right, I’ll take far left. Volunteers, you fill in the spots between us. Keep within sight of each other, and call out every few minutes. With any luck, we’ll make enough of a racket that he’ll hear and just come to us, which would save us a lot of hiking.”

Everyone nodded, and loaded themselves and the rescue gear into the trucks, Maria climbing into the other side of Natasha’s cab. They’d got an ambulance sent from Helena to wait in Whitlash, just in case, and Tara’s truck had a stretcher in it. 

The drive to Whitlash was quick, the sun finally cresting the horizon as they drove. The grass around Sunburst turned bright orange as the sun hit it, waves of pink and yellow moving through it with the breeze. 

“I guess that’s why they call it Sunburst,” Maria said, staring out the window. Natasha nodded, looking out over the prairie. 

“It’s gorgeous, isn’t it?” She asked happily. 

“Yeah,” Maria said breathily, not even looking away from the view. The line of the sun light up the soft skin on the side of her neck, casting her brown hair in a light caremalised honey colour, and throwing light and shadow over the curves of her face. She knew Maria was looking at the sunrise, but she was looking at Maria. 

The moment didn’t last long. The hike up Mount Brown was steep and rocky, and, aside from the regular shouts from volunteers, no one spoke much. 

Maria had taken the left, as the closest volunteer to Natasha, within speaking distance. They climbed for several hours until the sun was streaming through the trees. She could hear Maria grumbling to herself every time she stumbled, which on the terrain, was often.

“I am a city girl, Romanoff,” she said pointedly, when she fell over and grazed her hands. She brushed them lightly herself, to get the dirt out of them, and gave Natasha a disgruntled look. “I came to this godforsaken piece of wilderness to see  _ you _ and this is how you repay me, making me  _ hike _ ?”

Natasha smiled at that. There was a twig in Maria’s hair. It was nice to see where Natasha now felt at home, and where the polish of the city was slowly rubbing off her. 

“Surely you’ve had to hike for jobs before?”

“That was different. This, I am doing voluntarily.” Maria huffed, disgruntled, and then ran a hand through her hair.  “Oh, for Christ’s sake,” she said, when she pulled the twig out. 

Natasha stepped closer to her, leaning over to pull a leaf out of her ponytail. 

“Why’d you come then?” She asked. She’d been sure Maria had come to convince her back to New York, maybe to hire her for Stark, or a new SHIELD. But to hear her say “ _ to see you _ ” had thrown that surety into doubt. Maria looked up at her, her blue eyes shining through her eyelashes. Normally about the same height at her, Maria was standing on a lower rock, and it felt, it felt like  _ something _ , to be above her. 

Maria blinked up at her. 

“Like I said, I came to see you.” She said, as if Natasha had missed something obvious, like a particularly dense new agent. 

“Huh,” Natasha said, letting herself process that. Maria rolled her eyes hard, the kind of full exasperation she’d only seen her show a few times. 

“God, you’re really dumb sometimes,” she said, under her breath, and quickly pushed onto her tiptoes, tall enough now to lean forward and kiss Natasha. The air was warm around them, not the full heat of a Montana summer day just yet, but Natasha felt the heat rise suddenly as soon as Maria’s lips touched hers. She felt instinct take over, good human instincts, not programming, and she stepped forward to be on Maria’s level, gripping her shoulder. She pressed into the kiss easily, and Maria made a breathy, soft sound that made Natasha feel like she was falling, the bottom of her stomach dropping out.

Maria grabbed her hip, pulling her close, so that their breasts and bellies pressed together, hips bumping. Natasha felt like she was holding a fist around an electric fence, that vibrating, exciting nearly-pain, held on the edge by Maria’s lips on hers. 

“Sheriff!” That was Ryan shouting for her, but she didn’t want to break away. It was Maria that ended the kiss finally, her lips twisted in what would have been a smirk, if Natasha didn’t think it was so hot. Maria was right, she was really dumb. If she could have had this three years ago, if only she’d told Maria where she was going and why, she was gonna be kicking herself. 

“Sheriff, I think we got something!” Ryan shouted again, visible now through the trees, moving towards them. Natasha was seriously tempted to tell him to turn around and get back on the trail but she suspected her authority would only reach so far there. She sighed, and started picking her way towards him, back onto the trail, but when she looked at Maria, she had a wicked look on her face, like whatever had started was only the beginning.


End file.
